[...]

English poetry of the nineteenth century was doomed by its own pretentiousness (“poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind”). Victorian scepticism made us draw in our horns: “Poetry is a Criticism of Life.” But Samuel Butler and his kind were the Critics of Life; the English poets of the ’nineties, misapplying some recent hints from the French, left Life and Mankind out of it and turned to cultivating their gardens. A suburban individualism prevailed, the penalty for the bumptious anarchism of the Romantic Revival. The poets of the ’nineties and the Geurgians who succeeded them were crippled by a reaction from the prophets; they did not dare to be moral, didactic, propangandist or even intellectual; fear of being thought hypocritical precluded them from interest either in God or their neighbour. This bogey of hypocrisy had hamstrung our intellects.

Contemporary with this fairly homogeneous suburban movement (which began with aestheticism and ended with a castrated nature-poetry and occasional pieces: see the Georgian Anthologies, passim) there were certain sturdier freak-growths, e.g., Mr Kipling’s jingoism and Mr Housman’s pastorals. Neither Kipling nor Housman has had successors, though they both anticipated certain freedoms of diction and Housman anticipated the all-pervading irony of post-War poetry. More important was the Irish movement, where poetry was healthily mixed up with politics. Yeats’s early poems, which many would take as typical escape-poetry, were very much more adulterated with life than e.g. the beery puerilities of Messrs Chesterton and Belloc. We now laugh at the Celtic Twilight and at the self-importance of these dilettante nationalists, but their naïveté and affectation had matured the ground for poetry. Where it is possible to be a hypocrite, it is also possible to be a hero, a saint, or an artist. It was hardly possible for a poet to be a hypocrite in England in the pre-War period. Hence the thrill (and subsequent, as it seems to us, hypocrisy) of writers like Rupert Brooke, when the War broke out.

We must not too readily assign the War as a cause of developments in the arts. By the time the War broke out, Mr Pound and his Imagists had already asserted themselves, Mr Eliot had read his Laforgue, Mr Yeats was working steadily to make his verse less “poetic”, Free Verse was an old story and Marinetti had invented Futurism. But in England at any rate this left-wing literature did not become notorious till after the War. And in 1922 appeared the classic English test-pieces of modern prose and [15] verse - Ulysses by James Joyce and The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. To most of the intelligent minority both these works appeared incoherent and obscure; Ulysses was also considered overwhelmingly obscene. The same minority would now agree that neither work is so difficult if approached from the right angle, and that as for obscenity there is far more in any popular magazine. We have new standards of coherence and of poetic meaning. Joyce as well as Eliot has had great influence on our poetry - for two reasons. As a technician he uses words in that subtle way which is usually the privilege of poets. As a very sensitive observer his acceptances and rejections (vulgarly called his realism) have sanctioned the acceptance or rejection of certain subject matters in poetry.

Joyce and Eliot were accepted as protagonists of the New Order. Both these writers have an aristocratic objectivity or impersonality due to a wide acquaintance with European culture. The hot-gospelling element for post-War England was supplied by D. H. Lawrence. The young contrived to be influenced by these three very different writers simultanaeously. The three had this in common, that they transgressed the limits of the pre-War Suburban Individualists. Eliot reintroduced into poetry first the intellect and later Christianity; Lawrence had the welcome bad taste to be a prophet; Joyce, instead of cultivating his garden, attempted with superb effrontery and industry to assimilate the modern world.

For a decade after the War these three were dominant. But Lawrence was too vague and Eliot and Joyce were too wide. Before discussing the present very important poetic reaction, I will mention some of the experiments tried in English poetry during this post-War period. In France, the Surréalistes appeared soon after the War, though knowledge of their work is beginning only now to penetrate into England; Paul Valéry, on the other hand, broke a fifteen years’ silence in 1917 with La Jeune Parque. English poets have, however, been mainly (and too much so) influenced by other English poets; the imitators of Eliot would have done well to read Eliot’s originals, just as the irrationalists would have done well to read their Freud. On the whole the period [16] is too literary. It is only now that poets are learning to forget their literature. Here Mr Pound is one of the worst offenders. For very many years he has been repeating, rather hysterically, that he is an expert and a specialist; but he has specialized his poems into museum pieces. His recently published A Draft of Thirty Cantos is, I suppose, a good piece of its kind; like Ulysses it is certainly far the longest of its kind. I maintain, however, that the kind is not one to be encouraged. What Mr Grigson has called “the cultural reference rock-jumping style”, even if feasible in a poem of the length of The Waste Land where every reference can be manoeuvred to pull its weight, is bound to lose its virility in a work as vast as the Cantos. Apart from this, Mr Pound’s effects are very monotonous; he uses the same cadences again and again for glamour, and the same contrasts again and again for brutality (or reality). The faults in his work should remind us of certain practical, if pedantic, truths. Quantity must always affect quality. A metre of green, as Gauguin said, is more green than a centimetre, but a bucket of Benedictine is hardly Benedictine. Mr Pound does not know when to stop; he is a born strummer. The second Aristotelian truth against which he offends is this. The poet’s method must be specifically poetic (something between the philosopher’s and the somnambulist’s). Or we may put it that poetry is a genre somewhere between play and science. The poet must ape neither the scientist nor the child with his ball; Mr Pound apes them both. The child, and the ordinary man when he is being childish, exploit an activity which is other than the poetic. They go out of their way to use a home-made jargon, nicknames, private allusions, tags of special knowledge. It can, of course, be maintained that all this is poetic [17] or artistic efflorescence, that when a middle-class Englishman quotes Frenchy he is satisfying an artistic impulse. It can similarly be maintained that dreams, alcohol, sex or looking at a landscape give us a pleasure (or a release or a consummation or anything else) identical with that given us by poetr, and that we take to reading poetry for the sam reason as we take to these other things. Thus Mr E. E. Cummings says that his poems are about competing with roses and locomotives. All this may be so, but if poets are to continue to exist (as they will so long as there are people not contented with roses and locomotives) it is essential that the poet should do more than give you a drink or tell you to look at the view; he must use words and at that he must still give you more than the child gives you when he distorts or jingles for his pleasure or the grown man when he makes a pun or a quotation. We may agree with the psychologist who tells us that all these activities are fundamentally akin. Mature and civilized man is concerned with the surface. We must maintain differences. Or else we must be honest monist-nihilists and not meddle with the arts. It is honest to say of a picture “It doesn’t matter which colour goes there, it’s all canvas underneath,” but it is not honest, if one holds this point of view, to become a painter. There has been a great deal recently of this (often unwitting or half-witted) dishonesty; see the past numbers of Transition, passim, or Mr Pound’s recent Active Anthology or even the earlier, almost forgotten Imagists.” It is the kind of dishonesty which was magnificently attacked by Mr Wyndham Lewis in The Enemy No. 1. I am summarizing the “Enemy’s” attack when I say succinctly that Mr Pound lacks grip; professing to offer us poetry [18] he is always falling back on easier substitutes. These substitutes, thanks to the psychologists and the flux-philosophers, are to-day at a high premium; this is made an excuse for both excessive laziness and excessive industry. Further instructive examples of this intellectual epidemic are found in the poetry of Mr Robert Graves, Miss Laura Riding, the Sitwells and Mr E. E. Cummings.

[...]

Eliot’s precisely tentative essays have reminded a world deafened by catchwords in how delicate a ratio or harmony a poem consists. But he has necessarily committed himself to a catchword or two in return, the most notorious of which is “impersonality”. To understand a man’s catchword you must collate it with his tastes; among those authors whom Eliot most admires are the Jacobean dramatist and Donne, Dryden and Baudelaire. Herein (excepting Dryden?) most of us agree with or follow him. But we must notice that Eliot, having an imitative mind and ear, has details in his work similar to all four of the above, yet in the total effect of his poems he is not only different from but alien to these writers. The reason for this is partly his basic romanticism. [...; 22] No amount of wit can counterbalance the mood, and in Eliot’s verse the mood is dominant. But if Eliot has failed to be classical himself, his influence has been towards classicism. At a time when English poetry was sagginf desperately he has restored its nervous tension.

[... T]he difference between Eliot and his imitators was this; a though to Eliot is, in most cases, really an experience of the first value but to most clever young men thoughts rank far below sensations. And so their poems were frigid intellectual exercises (though very good practice for undergraduates). Mr. Empson;s poems seem to me to be still of this type. [23]

[...]

We are now in danger of a poetry which will be judged by its party colours. Bourgeois poetry is assumed to have been found wanting; the only alternative is communist poetry. This seems to be an over-simplification. I doubt whether communist and bourgeois are exclusive alternatives in the arts and, if they are, I suspect these would-be communist poets of playing to the bourgeoisie. And I ahve no patience with those who think that poetry for the rest of the history of mankind will be merely a handmaid of Communiism. Christianity, in the time of the Fathers, made the same threats [...] The three most interesting poets in New Signatures [ed. Michael Roberts] are W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis; all three in their poems are implied communists and often propagandists. Like all propagandists (cp. Shelley) they sometimes make themselves ridiculous. Auden is often saved by his technical concentration and Spender by his technical economy but Day-Lewis, who writes longer and looser works and has not much sense of humour, has commited lamentable ineptitudes while preaching the cause. Compare his two long poems sequences, From Feathers to Iron, and The Magnetic Mountain. IN the former the theme is personal and is maintained throughout with dignity. The Magnetic Mountain, [25] which is propagandist, begins with a very fine figure (that of the Kestrel) but falls away into slipshod satire, derivative Auden, and priggishness. Both Auden and Day-Lewis in common with so many less articulate admirers of the Soviet) suffer from an inverted jingoism reminiscent of Kipling and Newbolt:

A blinding light ... and the last man in.

Day-Lewis is (so far) an inferior poet to Auden and Spender, perhaps because his vision is purer and more consistent. Auden has many bourgeois tastes and Spender is a naif who uses communism as a frame for personal thrills. (It is significant that he admires the now unfashionable Romantic Revival). Spender is the easiest of these poets to understand (but not to appreciate) at first reading: Auden, who to start with was very difficult is grinding his verse into simplicity. [...; 26]

In his [Eliot’s] latest verse, the choruses in The Rock (1934), the Bible has (appropriately) been an important stylistic factor. Eliot is as receptive to stylistic influences as Joyce. Thanks to a stern self-discipline he has avoided writing mere pastiches but a less wary poet who tries to adopt the Eliot way of writing will find it is not one way but many and be lost in derivativeness. What first strikes readers of Eliot is his gift for point and his surprise effects; but point and surprise can both be faked. In The Rock Eliot himself seems to me to get some of his smart effects, especially of antithesis, too easily; they are too pat; they do not ring true. This is an inevitable trap for his imitators.

Eliot’s verse was only free in that he allowed himself to ring the changes quickly; one moment conversation; the next moment Senecas sententiousness (for the latter the traditional blank [29] verse lines is always cropping up again; but thanks to quick change juxtapositions it had temporarily regained its freshness.) But other poets were bound to want a more stable medium. [...; (pp.38-39.)

[...]

Auden’s great asset is curiosity. Unlike Eliot, he is not (as a poet) tired. It is significant that in The Rock where Eliot attempts to give his poetry a social reference, the passages which ring truest are still those which are non-social, individualist, even suicidal. (There is nothing so individualist as suicide.) Auden is not so sophisticated; he is not old with reading the Fathers. He reads the newspapers and samples ordnance maps. He has gusto, not literary gusto like Ezra Pound, but the gusto which comes from an unaffected (almost ingenuous) interest in people, politics, careers, science, psychology, landscape and mere sensations. He has a sense of humour. To say he is an Aeschylus as some people have done, is merely stupid and might encourage him to be pompous. His job is to go on observing things from his very unusual angle and recording them (need I say that the combined process of observing and recording = creation?) in his very individual manner. His style is still changing, towards a wider intelligibility; and he has a strong tendency towards satire and burlesque. He may therefore be expected to produce either further “serious” work as in the Charade and the earlier poems, or comic work ranging from mere satire to Artistophanic fantasy. [...; 37]

Stephen Spender is very different from Auden, who has, however, greatly influenced both his outlook and manner of writing. He has been advertised as the “lyricist” of the new movement and is the most likely of these poets to become “popular”. He will also be the man for posterity, if our poetry is ever dug up in fragments; here is someone who really felt, posterity will say; and will conclude that he died young. His poems ave a fragmentary appearance as it is. I sometimes think that this is vicious but prefer to conclude that it is their virtue. His poems have not got that crystal self-contained perfection which is so glibly attributed to the ideal lyric. Nor do they impress one with the approved shock at first reading. Their machinery is creakingly evident; the last line of the poem tends to be an especially telling one, while the personal or propagandist (and in either case not very unusual) subject matter is enlivened with “poetical” images (roses, stars and suns) or with save-work epithets like “beautiful” and “lovely”. As for the cultural background, Spender has swallowed D. H. Lawrence whole and mixed him up with Shelley, Nakt-Kutlre andCommunist Evangelism. [...; 38]

[...]

There are a dozen or so other young poets in England who, whatever their “creed”, at any rate believe in, and write about, something other than their own moods. I have not spoken of them because, having only seen their work so far in periodicals, I am more struck by what they have in common than by their individualities. There seems also to be a flourishing school in America, which, in reaction from experimental impressionism, is consciously limiting itself to a certain well-girdered and substantial way of writing. Again, I have not read them enough or reread them enough, to criticize them. For me the history of post-War poetry in England is the history of Eliot and the reaction from Eliot. By Eliot I mean the Eliot of Poems 1909-1925. Needless to say Eliot himself has been reacting from his earlier poetic self in Ash Wednesday, his various Ariel poems, and, most recently, in the choruses in The Rock. But though these later poems may as kinds of poem have more possibilities for the future, I feel at [39] the moment that “Gerontion”, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, and even “Prufrock” are better of their kind. Eliot is a theologian manqué; he is very susceptible to myth; his myths make him as much as he makes them. The Waste Land is a very delicate dovetailing of his favourite myths, profane and sacred. He has written much more simply and clearly from the public’s standpoint but not perhaps from his own. On this question of obscurity, I would say finally that, though it is wrong to go out of one’s way to be obscure, it is just as wrong to go out of one’s way to be intelligible. The poet must fulfil (a far better word than “express”) himself. Eliot fulfilled himself in The Waste Land. He is essentially that kind of poet. The Waste Land, like The Ancient Mariner, cannot become a practical classic, i.e. a classic which the next poets shall use as a model. I have written this article primarily to indicate how the new English poetry is developing. This is why I have spoken of Eliot’s poetry mainly as a point from which instead of assessing it on its own undeniable merits. This is also why I have not spoken of our other great living poet, Mr Yeats.

Mr Yeats is the best example of how a poet ought to develop if he goes on writing till he is old. I am not one of those who have nothing to say for his earlier poems and everything to say for his later poems. He is a very fine case of identity in difference and anyone, who is not pleading some irrelevant cause, can see this; e.g., to mention details, he still speaks of “Tully” and he still uses the fantastic refrain à la D. G. Rossetti or Morris. But he has, in his own way, kept up with the times. Technically he offers many parallels to the youngest English poets. Spender is like him in that they both have worked hard to attain the significant statement, avoiding the obvious rhythm and the easy blurb. Auden and Day-Lewis both use epithets in Yeats’s latest manner. But when all is said, Yeats is esoteric. He is further away from the ordinary English reader or writer than Eliot is; not only because of his cabalistic symbols, etc., but even more because of the dominance in him of the local factor. His rhythms and the texture of his lines are inextricably implicated with his peculiar past and even with the [40] Irish landscape. They are, therefore not to be closely copied. If we must copy we should either copy people of our own age and society (wholesome plagiarism) or else people so far removed from us by time or language that our copying will not imposeupon anyone. Thus I avoides reading Eliot for three years or so, that I might not write fake Eliot [...]

I will end with a few predictions for the near future. “Pure poetry”, as we have seen, is on the decline; this does not mean that poetry is to masquerade as anything else. For poetry qua poetry is an end and not a means; its relations to ’life’ are impossible to define; even when it is professedly “didactic” “propagandist” or “satirical” the external purport is, ultimately, only a conventional property, a kind of perspective which many poets like to think of as essential. In the near future we shall have a great deal more communist poetry (and a certain amount of reactionary nationalist - witness Mr Hugh MacDiarmid). But in as far as these poets have the sense of touch, their poetry (whether they think so or not) will not be ancillary to their politics, but their politics ancillary to their poetry. The same applies to psychology. Poets may believe that a poem is merely a psychological document, and such a belief may encourage their output but, in as far as they have the sense of touch, their psychology will be subordinated. I see a future, therefore, for both psychological and political poetry, though in both classes there will inevitably be a good deal of faking and a good deal of honest futility.

What I have said about “History” should indicate the importance of narrative poetry. I have noticed that most theories of what poetry is, leave no room for Homer, though nearly everyone assumes that Homer is poetry. This inconsistency is due to the dominance in modern times of the lyric; disgracefully fostered by both dilettantes and mystagogues. The short poem has naturally a unique concentration; even so 1 notice that, in spite [41] of the popular assumption that any one “lyric” should be entirely self-supporting, yet our appreciation of it is greatly helped by a reading of other lyrics by the same author; more than this, we think of it (generally half-consciously) as a part of a whole, constituted by its author’s other poetry and often (if we are not to cant) by certain aspects of the author himself.

Spender’s latest poem, Vienna, is a poem of nearly thirty pages on a contemporary theme. Unsuccessful, I think (still too voulu) but the right kind of experiment. I expect poets in the near future to write longer works (epics, epyllia, verse, essays and autobiographies) which will, for the intelligent reader, supersede the stale and plethoric novel. The more sensitive novelists (e.g. Mrs Virginia Woolf) are approaching poetic form. The novel-reading public will always gulp its port, and writers who want their historicized symbols to be taken seriously would be better advised (provided they have “a feeling for words”) to deploy them in verse.

As for Poetic Drama, there are at the moment many signs of a renaissance. Here, as in narrative, the verse-technique will at first have to be rather loose, until a compromise is reached between significant condensation and more or less instantaneous intelligibility. In its dramatic aspect it will probably go through an eclectic stage (borrowing from the music hall, morality plays, etc.) until, in Aristotle’s phrase, it attains its own nature.

In narrative, drama, propaganda, satire, etc., we shall have to compromise with the public. In the shorter poem not so much so. It would be a great pity to go back to the Georgians and [42] sacrifice the intellectual gains of the “difficult” poets. But I imagine we shall allow our readers some compensation. When we are esoteric (mystical or metaphysical) we shall prop them up with a palpable outward form (like Yeats or Valéry) till they have time to collect our tenuous implications. When, on the other hand, we are chaotic in outward form we shall give them something to grip in the nature of “content”. The best poems are written on two or more planes at once, just as they are written from a multitude of motives. Poetry is essentially ambiguous, but ambiguity is not necessarily obscure. There is material for poetry everywhere; the poet’s business is not to find it but to limit it. Part of his job is forgetting. We want to have the discoveries of other poets in our blood but not necessarily in our minds. We want just enough a priori to make us ruthless so that when we meet the inrush of a posteriori (commonly called “life”) we can sweep away the vastly greater part of it and let the rest body out our potential pattern; by the time this is done, it will be not only a new but the first pattern of its kind and not particularly ours; the paradox of the individual and the impersonal. To write poetry needs industry and honesty and a good deal of luck.

[End]

Note: the appended “Books to Read” list includes Eliot, Pound, W. B. Yeats, Robert Graves, Laura Riding, Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell, D. H. Lawrence, Roy Campbell, Auden, Spender, Day-Lewis, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wilfred Owen and mentions Hugh MacDiarmid (”A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle is a vigorous fantasia in synthetic Scots”) and Wyndham Lewis (One-Way Song) as well as anthologies edited by Ezra Pound (with poems by William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore) and Michael Roberts (with poems by Charles Madge, R. E. Warner, and Richard Goodman). [43-44].